It’s hard to say when she started stalking me. I felt her looming before I saw her. Each time, I filled up with dread. I kept my anxieties secret, sure that no one would believe me. Unsure if I believed myself. For a while, she showed up in glimpses. Glimpses became stints. Stints became prison bars that wouldn’t unlock, not even for a second. Until one day, she died.
Died.
Awash with grief, I cried over her grave. How crazy is that? I mean crazy in the psychotic sense of the word. I must have been downright delusional. Or maybe I’d finally become sane.
I’ll start in the middle of the story, where I think this all got interesting.
I was eighteen years old and moving from my Minnesota hometown to midtown Manhattan. During high school, my theater director had seen modeling potential in me. Although she was legally blind, I desperately wanted to believe her. So I answered a newspaper ad and landed a photoshoot with photographers who turned out to be agents.
I could barely match my own clothes and looked more like Anne Hathaway’s character at the beginning of The Devil Wears Prada than a fashionista. But something about performing for cameras, like acting without the lines I struggled to memorize, enthralled me. Before the lens, I became someone far removed from my teenage insecurities. Finally, I’d found something I excelled at. I wanted more.
After months of forcing myself to wake up early to exercise and eat healthier, I signed a contract with the esteemed Wilhelmina Models. Before then, I’d only flown out of the Midwest once.
Numerous people warned me about the culture shock before I left. “You can’t possibly be prepared,” an acquaintance warned. “New York is nothing like the movies.”
Only it was exactly like the movies. During my ride to the apartment, I saw someone pee out of a taxi door. My first time entering a subway station, a plump rat scuttled before me. The city’s buzz matched my neurodivergent brainwaves in ways I’d one day understand. The city seldom slept well, just like me.
I was more nervous about meeting my roommates than I was about castings. Perhaps that should have been a sign. Outside the apartment door, I inhaled a strengthening breath. You can do this. After several knocks, the door creaked open.
Rather than the sophisticated women holding champagne flutes I’d imagined, my roommates were sprawled around in sweats, watching Jerry Springer.
“Hi! I’m August and I’m from Minnesota.” Why had my voice come out so nerdy-cheerleader-like? Back home, I’d felt like a rebel. Here, I felt like a Mormon librarian.
“Polina from Buryatia,” one of them said flatly.
Where even was Buryatia? Minnesota felt worlds away. For years, I’d longed to have grand adventures in new places. Now that I’d arrived in one, I couldn’t even move. I stood there like a cow staring over a country farm fence awaiting food or attention—the kind I’d seen during countless drives. I suddenly missed those cows.
A softer voice sounded. “I’m Niko. Need help with your stuff?”
My body softened. “I think I’m okay. Just…where should I put it?”
Niko must have pitied me, given her chicness. Even her sweatpants that draped from her pointy hips seemed expensive. Her flip flops clacked on the floor as she guided me to a bedroom housing two sets of bunk beds. Rumpled clothes and empty cigarette boxes dotted the floor. Overwhelmed, I cried myself to sleep.
Come morning, I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner, which said a lot. I never forgot a meal. My stomach rumbling a symphony, I tiptoed to the kitchen, careful not to wake anyone. Approaching the fridge, Beth, the roommate who’d given me the worst vibes, appeared. I gasped.
“Sorry, you scared me,” I said, unsure why I disliked her so much.
She leaned her back against the counter, clutching a mug to her chest. “You think you can make it here, huh?”
I didn’t know how to respond. Instead, I glanced around the kitchen, spotting a bag of bagels. “Is any of this food for everyone? I could pitch in.”
Beth lifted the bagels and moved them toward me. As my fingers touched the bag, she snatched it away. “Nope, and these are mine. But there’s a fruit stand out front. Better for the waistline anyway.” She eyed my midsection.
The comment enraged me. But maybe she was right. I’d worked too hard to get there to not do everything I could to succeed.
Over the following days, Beth stunned me in different ways. Her snarky remarks turned complimentary. Beneath her aloof shell, I sensed we had a lot in common. Part of my initial dislike may have stemmed from her gorgeousness and confidence, attributes I needed professional makeup and camera magic to possess. She had the secret recipe for perfection. For some reason, she wanted to share it with me.
“I have a guest pass for the gym if you wanna go,” she said on my second New York morning.
I followed her out the door like an eager puppy—eager for friends, for acceptance, for anything that felt like a life.
Soon, Beth and I were inseparable. We exercised together, shared mangos from the fruit stand, and critiqued each other’s catwalks in the apartment building hallways. While our roommates partied late into the night, we read novels, watched TV, and turned in early.
One evening, our relationship took an intimate turn. I couldn’t sleep and again found her in the kitchen. She stood there spooning Ben & Jerry’s into her mouth. Mesmerizing.
“Want some?” She taunted me with a spoonful.
I stepped toward her. God, it had been so long. My hunger became pulsating lust. Stepping closer, I felt her breath. Our mouths joined, hers filling mine with sweet decadence.
We consumed the entire pint and then each other, finishing on my bed. The next day we doubled our workout and shared a salad. We were in this together. I needed Beth. I supposed she needed me, too.
Isn’t that how all abusive relationships begin? With strong feelings? Intoxicating, chocolatey, love-bomby feelings wrapped in the paper of codependency.
It took me a long time to realize that Beth was controlling me. By then, she dictated how I spent my time and monopolized most of it. Once I saw the toxicity, I was too far in. How can you leave someone when escaping would feel like extricating yourself?
A terrifying moment came when I was thumbing through photos from home. I lifted one of me from high school. Pre-modeling me looked so different from the woman I was becoming. Examining the image closer, my insides churned. Beth was in the photo. Younger, but unmistakably there. She’d been in Minnesota, too. She’d followed me, I was sure of it. I might never get away.
I did get away eventually. After several false starts, I reached a bottom that became a springboard for survival. That morning, I’d skipped our morning workout to indulge in brunch with my agent. Afterward, Beth punched me in the stomach, ridiculed me, and poured a poisonous substance down my throat to make me throw up. If I didn’t puke, she said, the poison would gnaw at my insides until my heart stopped.
I sobbed, projectile vomited so hard I tore the flesh in my throat, and passed out in the courtyard where she left me to suffer. Someone found me—I don’t recall who—and I ended up in the hospital. Soon after, I started therapy.
“So, tell me why you’re here,” Anne, my therapist, said at our first session.
“I thought you knew.”
“I read your form, so I have an idea. I’d like to hear it from you.”
I fumbled with my hoodie zipper. “I guess…because I don’t want to be miserable anymore.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“It is?” My answer hadn’t felt like a fabulous proclamation. Or realistic.
“Of course. You’d be surprised how many people stay with the misery because they refuse to let go of the cause.”
Who said anything about letting go?
For months, I deceived Anne. I lied about my aspirations and my fantasies. I even lied about how “well” I was doing. Feeling much better, oh yes I am!
Finally, Anne called me out. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really happening?”
“What do you mean?” But of course, I knew.
She leaned forward in her chair. “You can tell me anything. No judgment.”
I fought a well of emotions until tears lined my cheeks. I dabbed them away, my dark eyeliner smudging onto the tissue. Anne half-laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Honestly, I was offended.
“Not funny exactly. It’s just that I thought your makeup was tattooed on. It always looks perfect. I suppose it’s refreshing that you’re not.”
“Oh.” Oh…
“Can I tell you what I think?” Anne paused. “I think you’ve put so much pressure on yourself to be perfect that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a person.”
Her words felt like permission. “Well, I’m not perfect. But you could be right.”
“Why don’t we try this? Tell me what you’ve been going through, without blaming yourself. None of the, ‘I know I shouldn’t have done blank.’ In fact, let’s make your eating disorder a person. She’s not you, after all.”
She’s not? “Okay.”
“Good. So what would you like to call her? Or him, or whatever gender you’d like.”
I considered this other entity, the disorder that haunted me. “Female feels right. Like the femaleness of what the world tells me to be? I’ll call her Beth.”
“Any significance?”
I smirked. “I had a roommate named Beth. We didn’t talk much, but she was so judgy.”
“Alright then, judgy Beth it is. Now tell me about the first time you encountered her—not your roommate, but the entity. When did she start creeping in?”
Through that session and several more, I detailed the times Beth made me feel awkward about my appearance. How when I was five years old, she wouldn’t let me kneel in certain pants because they made my thighs look fat. How in middle school she taught me that “fat” was a horrible (although actually fat-phobic) insult, and that attracting boys—super important—meant I had to skip lunch. When I’d later eat a whole tube of crackers, she’d scold me.
Beth grew quieter in my teens when I gleaned positive attention for my looks. Maybe she was all in my head. When a photographer suggested I “lose a few pounds” if I wanted to succeed as a model, Beth returned with a vengeance. She cheered me on, filling me with euphoria at first. Intoxicating soulmate love. Every time I approached a finish line Beth set, she inched the ribbon further so I could never cross it.
When I started binging between bouts of starvation, Beth stuffed the food in my mouth then bullied me for days, her punishments intensifying. By then, I saw Beth’s true colors. I wanted her gone. But how?
“I still can’t let go,” I confessed several sessions of this role play exercise in.
Anne’s eyes glistened with tears, maybe because I’d just told her about the poison I sometimes consumed. “What would happen if you did?”
“I can’t imagine. But this has to be worse.” I couldn’t bear life as I knew it, nor did I want to die.
So I made a commitment to myself. For one year, the longest I could fathom, I would not brutalize myself for eating any food in any amount. Even when I binged to the point that I fell into a trance, coming to in a pile of food remnants, my belly aching as though it might explode, I’d carry on. I would eat the next meal, and the next. I’d cut the size tags from my clothes and buy larger, stretchier ones. I’d avoid mirrors. I’d put my energy into other things—hobbies I’d long abandoned, like songwriting.
The morning after my last binge, I woke up swollen and puffy, my eyelids crusty from tears. Rather than plot self-revenge, I sat down at the kitchen table and ate breakfast. Each spoonful of cereal into my mouth took a wall of courage. Then with a trembling hand, I grabbed my guitar.
Beth’s death wasn’t a sudden collapse, but the gradual kind. Her voice decrescendoed as I reclaimed my own. She started to feel more like a memory than a complicated, controlling lover.
One day I tossed nuts from my grammy’s countertop into my mouth, no thoughts of the meal I’d eaten shortly before. No dietetic calculations or unwarranted guilt.
“I think she’s gone,” I told Anne at my next session. The same day, I shared that my periods had returned. Apparently my body trusted me. Maybe because I’d begun to trust myself.
I’m in my late forties now and consider myself fully recovered, a privilege not all eating disorder survivors experience. Recently, though, I feared Beth was clawing her way back like a horror film zombie. In a mirror, I saw her in my forehead lines, the thinning of my hair, the creases around my eyes. My heart thundered. What if my body dysmorphia had returned? I squeezed my eyes shut and reopened them, staring and thinking.
I almost laughed at the ridiculousness when it struck me. I wasn’t seeing imagined “flaws.” I was seeing an aging woman. A person with a face. The kind our culture fails to celebrate or even allow. I wasn’t mentally ill again. I was simply alive in America.
I straightened my posture, forcing gratitude and determination. I have the chance to age, to respect age-related changes, to invest my energy elsewhere. I can resist society’s rules.
In doing so, maybe there won’t be quite so many Beths in the world. Maybe a young person will see me aging with acceptance, neutrality, or even pride and give herself permission to deprioritize her appearance rather than fuse it with her self-worth. Rather than fall in love with a stalker, maybe she’ll fall in love with how it feels to be herself.
A year into my eating disorder recovery, I buried a time capsule containing photographs, journal pages, and poems. Resting my hand on the lumpy mound of soil, I bid Beth goodbye, giving her a proper burial.
Jolted by profound grief, I wept. Beth was brutal, abusive, and toxic. She almost killed me more than once. But she was also mine. Who was I without the illness of her? Without her chaos?
If I could relay a message to the woman I was then, I would tell her that the most wonderful things in her life would stem from figuring that out.
August McLaughlin is a journalist, author of thrillers and nonfiction, and host/producer of the podcast, Girl Boner Radio. Her writing and expertise have been featured in a range of publications, including Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Shape. Her next book, the psychological thriller, Climax, will be released in late 2027 (Rogue River, Roan & Weatherford).
